Why Your Back Pain Keeps Coming Back: Applied Kinesiology and the Muscle Imbalance Question

Most back pain that “keeps coming back” isn’t really coming back. It never left. What changes is which muscle is taking the load.

After fifty years of watching people work through cycles of recovery and recurrence, I’ve learned that the muscle that hurts is usually not the one doing the work. It’s the one that’s been carrying the work alone for too long. The deeper question — which I almost always need a hands-on tool to answer — is which muscle wasn’t firing when the patient’s system got into trouble in the first place. That’s where Applied Kinesiology comes in.

What Applied Kinesiology actually tests

Applied Kinesiology, in the form I learned at Los Angeles College of Chiropractic in 1979, is not a parlor trick. It’s a hands-on neurological assessment that takes a specific muscle through a specific isolated movement against light resistance — and uses the response to read what the central nervous system is doing with that muscle. A muscle that “tests weak” in a clean isolation isn’t weak from disuse. It’s neurologically inhibited — the brain has, for some reason, downregulated its recruitment.

The reasons a brain inhibits a muscle are many. Old injury. Compensation for a joint that hurt to move six years ago. Reflex disconnect from a related organ. Lymphatic congestion in the local drainage. A subclinical infection (last issue’s topic) running in the background. The muscle test tells me a muscle is inhibited; the inquiry tells me why.

Why this matters for recurrent back pain

Consider a common pattern. A patient has a flare of low-back pain, sees a chiropractor, gets adjusted, feels much better for two weeks, then the pain returns. Adjusted again, again better, again returns. The adjustment is doing useful work in the moment. But if the gluteus medius is neurologically inhibited — and the patient’s quadratus lumborum has been carrying its work for years — every adjustment puts the joint back in alignment only for the same uneven muscle pull to load it back out within days.

The path to durable relief isn’t more adjustments. It’s restoring the inhibited muscle. Once the glute medius is firing again, the low back unloads on its own.

Working backward through the compensation chain

When I see a recurrent back-pain patient for the first time, I’m not asking where it hurts now. I’m asking: of the muscles that should be doing this work, which ones are neurologically asleep? I’ll test the deep hip stabilizers, the abdominal wall, the lower trapezius, the gluteus medius and maximus. Some will test strong. Others will test inhibited. The pattern of inhibition tells me the compensation chain — which muscle quit first, which muscle has been carrying its work, and where the chronic guarding lives.

Once I know the chain, the question changes from “what hurts” to “what do we need to restore to make this stable.” Sometimes that’s a chiropractic adjustment, sometimes acupuncture, sometimes Rolfing or ART for a fascial restriction, sometimes nutritional support for a fatigued organ that’s reflexively inhibiting a muscle through its meridian or somatovisceral connection. The Hidden Dysfunction Model holds: the pain is the fifth event. The inhibition is closer to the first.

When AK is the right call

Applied Kinesiology is not the right tool for acute trauma, fracture, or red-flag presentations — those need imaging and the appropriate medical workup. Where it shines is in the long-tail chronic pain that has resisted every direct treatment of the symptom. If your back pain keeps coming back after every intervention has briefly worked, the question is no longer where it hurts. It’s what isn’t firing.

Call the office for an intake. We’ll find out.